Книги, похожие на «Nikki Gemmell, With My Body»

Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan in this gripping novel of family breakdown.Ana Lewis is trapped by her own expectations. Her intense relationship with fellow student Alex begins to crack beyond repair when she falls pregnant, and his subsequent withdrawal, emotionally and sexually are hard for Ana to bear. Eventually, following the birth of Pip and then Davie, Alex leaves Ana to a life of question and blame. Locked in her room for much of the time she woefully neglects her children, preferring instead to replay scenes from her life over and over, fighting the urge to blink for fear it should dissipate the memories.Told within the context of two black boxes, one Ana’s and one Pip’s, the story reveals the key factors that have contributed to this catastrophic breakdown of life. In Black Box 01 we meet Ana as she begins to deconstruct her life. She rails against Alex and his inability to love her, or to put her ahead of his domineering mother.Black Box 02 is Pip’s diary which details in a schoolgirl terms the neglect that both Pip and Davie have suffered. Pip talks of her mother’s deterioration, lack of cleanliness and of her mother’s obsessions. Pip and Davie communicate through finger sign language, as their mother demands silence. Davie retreats into his own world, permanently soiled and communicating only by sign, while Pip, fat and desperate, sneaks out of the house at night to have sex with a boy who hates her. Pip and Davie exist in parallel, with only Ana's bedroom door separating her from them. She does not want to see them. They are the present and Ana chooses to live in a past, continually raking over the ashes of a relationship that was never really hers.Accomplished and affecting, Caroline Smailes weaves together a catastrophic tale of mismatched lives.

Over the course of a year, I undertook the task of working with twenty cartoons that stimulated my imagination. I pretended to reverse the traditional process of illustrating texts. I ”texted” the illustrations daily. The initial objective was to take the characters in a comical way, but they had a lot to tell me. It was the characters who whispered the words to me. They always had a life of their own and I couldn't dominate them anymore. All the poems, stories and monologues, in a way concatenated, retain a global vision although at first glance they appear as disconnected flashes in an exhibition of fireworks. This book aims to be a celebration of humor and irony, but at the same time it aspires to become a rare invitation to reflection and strangeness. Over the course of a year, I undertook the task of working with twenty cartoons that stimulated my imagination. I pretended to reverse the traditional process of illustrating texts. I ”texted” the illustrations daily. Like ”action painting”, I could have called it ”literature in action”, but it would have been to distort the nature of the project, which was a work in progress, a dynamic entity, an evolving process, a writing on the go, a progressive writing. I never had a predetermined plan and the categorization was later, but the invocations of the four classic elements influenced underground in the structure of the work.The initial objective was to take the characters in a comical way, but they had a lot to tell me. It was the characters who whispered the words to me. They always had a life of their own and I couldn't dominate them anymore. All the poems, stories and monologues, in a way concatenated, retain a global vision although at first glance they appear as disconnected flashes in an exhibition of fireworks. This book aims to be a celebration of humor and irony, but at the same time it aspires to become a rare invitation to reflection and strangeness.